


Chimera

by schmevil



Series: Chimera [2]
Category: Smallville
Genre: Alien Invasion, Alternate Reality, Gen, Superpowers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-01-28
Updated: 2010-01-28
Packaged: 2017-10-06 18:29:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,650
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/56543
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/schmevil/pseuds/schmevil
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lex is a meteor mutant. His body adapts. (Also, there's aliens).</p>
            </blockquote>





	Chimera

**Author's Note:**

> Take two.

Lex is a meteor mutant. His body adapts, slowly. Like the last of a bottle of honey, dribbling out with excruciating laziness. He keeps a mental journal of its progress - today my skin has learned how to ensure that it will always be perfect. It can heal every scar, no matter how bad, and even ones that are years-old. It has taken three months to learn this.

He can still feel that almost liquid, disgusting excuse for air, fighting its way through his veins, even though technically, it no longer has to fight - his lungs have accepted it. He doesn't let his mind though, never forgets that it isn't air, not Earth air.

When they first brought him here, and for months after, it was like breathing minuscule shards of glass, hooked up with smart homing devices, that knew just when and how to get the most hurt of a movement. He doesn't let himself forget.

 

Breath in. Capillaries burst. There's always blood in his lungs now. Blood everywhere. Breath out. Not the relief it should be. It's nice not to have that shit burning up his insides but his lungs are screaming for oxygen and it takes four times as many breaths here than usual, to get even the bare minimum of what he _needs_.

He stopped being able to see some time ago. He's nothing but flesh and air.

Breathe and he can almost feel the twitch that runs through his body. Maybe a ghost of sensation at this point - it doesn't hurt so much as consume. Devours what's left of his consciousness until he's the wave, sweeping through and switching everything one after another on, _on_. If he's convinced himself that he _is_ the pain then he has to be hallucinating, or at least part of him is.

He thinks he's only been here 24 hours. He's sure it's not less than that. He's marking out the passing hours, minutes, seconds. Scratching himself with them, writing with the only ink available. He shouldn't still be here, dead or alive.

Clark was supposed to be here within hours. They'd worked it all out. Planned it months ago. Clark should have made it up here in under five, easy. So something's not right and Lex isn't high priority enough, not in a practical sense, for Clark to take the risk.

He's going to get the fuck out of here. He doesn't doubt that for second. With or without Clark's help - if he has to claw his way through the hull and learn how to breathe in a vacuum he will, because Lex isn't quite finished yet.

 

At some point, things on the ship get fucked up, Lex included. He starts to think that he might be losing his mind. It's a more familiar feeling than it has any right to be. Novel though, because it will be the first time he's gone crazy in space.

 

He breathes out and isn't sure if the shuddering grown is his own body. He hasn't heard his heartbeat in... some time. It hurts. It hurts, everywhere, courtesy of the chief bug's last visit. Even breathing hurts again, but not as much as when he first got here, which is it's own kind of little miracle.

Now he's feeling more than pain. Something cold, a teasing stream across the backs of his calves and spreading quickly. His cell hasn't been cold for awhile. They had eventually turned off the maddening air conditioner that, for the first few months, gave him hypothermia on a regular basis. One of the first things his body had learned to do was cope with that.

This rogue air current is something new.

The groan is louder. Now he's sure it's nothing to do with him - it's shrieking, higher and higher, either a delusion or something metal under stress.

A rhythmic thumping settles in with the shrieking/groaning and Lex is treated to his very own performance of the traveling version of Stomp. Outside the hull there are a herd of young men with garbage can lids and big boots.

Outside the hull there is... something that wasn't there before and you can't hear. In space.

That teasing trickle of cold is pooling over his back now and fuck the possibility of frostbite, anything is better than a week of the humid mud of the ship.

Something shifts - maybe the ship itself - and he's _rolling_. His ribs, already tender, crack against the floor when he's thrown from his bunk.

The thumping stops, but not the groaning. It just gets louder

It's so loud it's soundless. Like everything, afterward.

 

There's snow falling on his face, he thinks.

And it hurts. It's cold, too cold, two kinds of burning on skin he thinks might just peel back and alight into the winter air.

He's steady. The ship is steady and he isn't moving - he can feel that much while everything is black, black, black. He's tempted to try to move his jaw, open it up enough to let his tongue drop out. See if he can taste the floor. He can't _see_ anything but he knows he's feeling snow.

"Lex!" Is that a hallucination?

And god, now he can smell it. In heaving gasps he can smell the snow, and the _oxygen_ shoots through him like he's mainlining it, straight from the womb and new to a non-liquid atmosphere.

If anything, his world is getting blacker and blacker, sensation dropping away like the illusion of functional vision. Black. There goes his legs - he hadn't known he could even _feel_ there. Black. There goes his torso. Black, black, black.

The last thing to go are his lips and nose, shivering and still trying to draw in _more_.

 

"Jesus." It comes from multiple sources and he's not going to bother tracking them.

Clark lays him out on the stretcher and the medical personnel crowd around him. Behind them, the soldiers press close. Lex's body is still shaking. So violent, like he's going to shake right apart. Jitters.

But he's undeniably alive and the medical personnel look encouraged. Dumb founded, sure, but pleased maybe. Not only have they got the medical find of the fucking millenium, they have have _Lex_ back, and one hell of a story to tell their grandkids if any of them live long enough to breed.

They're all bundled up in layers and layers of mismatched cloth but no one offers Clark a jacket. He's standing there, in his jeans and t-shirt and no one's batting an eye.

Clark Kent and Superman all at once.

He's only every been _that_ for his parents and Lois before.

Somehow it never counted with Lex, not even when they both knew that they both knew all of Clark's secrets.

At some point his eyes slip shut but he stays tuned in, listening to them argue over his body. Which still isn't a corpse. Probably not for a long time.

The doctors want to medicate him right away but Clark refuses, like he has the right. Says that Lex's body will have enough problems to deal with, in the next few hours, and that processing the massive dose of painkillers - what would be necessary to dull the pain - shouldn't be one of them.

Besides, Clark says, this is nothing. Lex has survived worse. Clark knows what he's talking about, even more than he thinks.

Later, he isn't sure how much later, but probably only a few seconds, he opens his eyes. Even that hurts. But already, he's hurting less.

Bloodshot and clouded, Lex's eyes find Clark's easily. A task made easier by Clark's determined stare - it's hard to miss. He forces his mouth into action, and manages "Cl-aa-rk-k," before choking on the blood streaming from his nose and then falling unconscious.

 

If Clark was still a romantic, he'd figure that Lex hanging onto consciousness until he's installed at his bedside, means something really special, but it's more likely that Lex is just pissed off that he's so late, and doing it out of spite. Clark isn't willing to entertain any alternative explanations just now, and Lex is more than capable of defying the limitations of the human body purely to spite him.

Lex understand sacrifice. Once Clark explains that he got waylaid by a convoy of gas-ships burning their way across central Asia, and then taking apart a developing bug-cult in the Great Steppe, Lex will probably scream at him. Possibly throw his thin, bunker-issue pillow at him. Lex will probably say that Clark should have stayed longer, made sure the bugs were well and truly gone, and all their newfound worshippers dead.

Clark made quick and dirty work out of both missions, knowing that Lex would prefer otherwise. Clark tells himself again that once he knows what happened, Lex won't mind the late rescue. He will _probably_ read Clark the riot act about the risks to get him back.

The troops are there, all throughout Asia and what used to be southern Russia, to clean up. Clark's seen a lot of villages, saved a lot of them and he's pretty sure that these ones will be fine without an ex-superhero's help. He has other places he needs to be.

He's a soldier now. That's what he told Lex when he burned the cape. Just a soldier like the rest of them. Since he can't use his powers until his human comrades make the way safe for him, by stripping the bugs' ships of their Kryptonite weapons, he's nothing special.

When it comes down to it, he doesn't really care if Lex thinks today was a justifiable risk. They downed one of the big ships, and they got Lex back.

Even more than the wins in Asia and Russia - not ex, because it's going to be Russia again, when this is all over - this convinces Clark that maybe, finally, they're starting to turn the corner.


End file.
